Dirac / Roon setup? Uhmm?

[igufi]

It is possible to integrate Dirac Live with Roon and Linn - I’m running such a setup right now. It is quite the Rube Goldberg machine but it does work. I learned about the combination on this forum a few years ago (you can search for my few posts on this forums to find it).

The idea is to use Dirac as a VST plugin, which unfortunately Roon does not support natively. However, Roon does support Squeezebox devices, which is the first part of the puzzle. We can direct the Roon audio stream to a virtual Squeezebox “device” that in reality acts as a bridge to UPnP media renderer, which hosts the Dirac VST plugin. Finally, the UPnP media renderer sends the Dirac-modified audio onwards to Linn for playback.

In practice, this is my setup:

• QNAP NAS hosts local audio and Roon Core
• Small low-powered PC (like HP Elitedesk and the like) runs Squeeze2UPnP software[1] and Foobar2000 [2]
• Foobar2000 runs Dirac Live VST and UPnP plugins
• Foobar2000 sends the Dirac-modified audio to Linn DS streamer

The setup works and the nice thing is that the Dirac modifications are done in the digital domain, the D/A conversion only happens once the stream hits the Linn streamer. No resampling etc. is done to the signal - whatever Roon sends to Squeeze2UPnP gets sent onwards bit-to-bit to Foobar2000.

There were lots of complications to get this thing working, not the least being getting the Dirac room measurements calculated and transferred to the small-form desktop PC installation of Dirac (I used a laptop to do the room calculations). If you really want to replicate this setup, we can chat through the dirty details in a separate thread.

Ideally Roon should just support VST plugins natively but that is not likely to happen as they want to keep the Core not having to have a graphical interface (which VSTs typically expect) so they can support headless setups (at least that was the reply given the last time VST plugins were requested).

[1] GitHub - philippe44/LMS-uPnP: Integrate UPnP players with LogitechMediaServer
[2] https://www.foobar2000.org/

[CrystalGipsy (Resisting the flow!)]

Sounds like a right heath robinson. Do you not im have Linns own correction algorithm on linn streamers?

[igufi]

True, Linn does support room mode corrections with their “Space Optimization”, but that is a completely passive system - you draw your room and enter the wall “types”, measurements of speaker & listener locations, tweeter height and your speaker model (if yours happens to be in their db). Space Optimization then does some calculations and applies a corrective curve on the signal. It’s better than nothing but far cry from what Dirac can do by actually recording the test signals in a room from multiple locations can compensating for phase shifts etc.